Kickstart: Meet the new bosses

North America's largest injection molders are getting some fresh leadership.

Both Berry Global Group Inc. — which ranked No. 1 in the most recent Plastics News ranking — and IAC Group, ranked No. 2, named new CEOs on Aug. 15. And both new leaders were picked from outside their respective companies, but both also have experience elsewhere in the end market.

Kevin Kwilinski is set to take over Evansville, Ind.-based packaging supplier Berry in October as Tom Salmon retires. Kevin Baird takes over IAC from David Prystash, who is retiring after less than three years ago at the company.

Kwilinski comes to Berry from label maker Multi-Color Corp., while Baird was an executive at auto supplier Tenneco and is the former CEO of SRG Global Inc., currently the No. 6 injection molder in North America, according to PN data.

And, as expected for global businesses these days, both companies have undergone a lot of changes in the last few years. Berry is in the midst of cost-cutting that is seeing it close 20 sites while responding to activist shareholders who want to see more value to their stocks. IAC has been rebuilding since a combination of COVID-19 and computer chip shortages tied up auto manufacturing.

Rather than bemoaning a black fly in your chardonnay, you could instead convert that fly into polycarbonate (apologies to Alanis Morissette).

Researchers at Texas A&M University said at an Aug. 14 American Chemical Society conference that black soldier flies' bodies contain polysaccharide chitin, a chemical that can be stripped out and made into a feedstock for polymers, Chemical & Engineering News writes.

Karen L. Wooley and her lab at Texas A&M said the feedstock is biodegradable and is essentially a fast-growing and inexpensive waste product.

"We don't want to be competing with things that we need for food, things that we need for fuel, things that we need for construction," Wooley told C&EN.

But personally speaking, the idea of being the person collecting thousands — or millions — of fly carcasses for feedstock is not a job I'd ever want.

When Los Angeles Times environment reporter Susanne Rust was challenged by her editors to keep track of exactly how much plastic she dealt with in her day-to-day life, she expected to find a lot. But as other reporters have discovered in the past, it was even more than she anticipated.

"In June, I made my first attempt and was immediately overwhelmed; just taking stock of my desk environment had me reconsidering my plastic self-awareness," Rust wrote for the LA Times in a story also available from AOL.com news. There was her hair clip, AirPods case, plastic on a tea kettle, window casings, bird decals on the windows, computer casing, computer monitor, phone charger, USB cords, computer mouse and mouse pad. And that's just to start.

"Activists and environmentalists say we can work to contain our plastic footprint," she wrote. "As I learned this week, it's almost impossible to avoid it altogether — especially for people who have other time commitments during the day, such as work, kids, hobbies, a need to exercise."